We did not give you up on Saturday, nor even on Sunday: on Sunday, about two o'clock, I got myself equipped, and fared forth
with an umbrella, thro' numerous showers (sheltering myself in doorways during the chief paroxysms) all the way to Berners
Street; where I learned that you were gone, the day before. I had left word here that you were to dine with us; but it was,
of course, over, then! The London Streets had a curious physiognomy that day while the rain fell. We had nothing for it but
Books, in the evening; no Jack there! Craik indeed came in; with a steady light, but with no radiance in the train of him.

I sleep a very great deal since my return, and as yet, unluckily, that is almost all I do. Daily one meets some new face on
the Street; but it is not in these that help can lie for me. I have a feeling that solitude, and private reflexion, will alone
be wholesome for me. Taisons [Let us keep quiet]— John Sterling is said to be coming up soon. I met W. Cunningham the other day, who told me so; and also
that he himself, by aid of his Wife, had realized a little daughter.1 Cunningham looked thin, but perhaps healthier than last time we had met. Darwin has been twice here; but I have missed him
both times,—only seen him once, in the distance, in his own street. On Sunday, after missing you, I was too dispirited and
dull to call there.——— Your Lafarge Memoirs give great satisfaction to the female mind;2 I have not yet got any of them read: the new Courrier de l'Europe &c arrived yesterday;3 Mazzini has snatched off the first Supplement, but probably brings it back even now, for I think I hear him down below at
this moment.

Last night came the enclosed Letter from poor little Jenny. I like the tone of it well, and also the news it brings. I will
write to the poor Lassie, and do you write when you have any good moment.

Had one money enough, Brighton were now almost as near as Bayswater was! The Berners-Hôtel waiter thought it “very likely
indeed that the gentlemen would come back:” I heartily hope it may be so.

The rain is all but perpetual here; one dare not go out except fortified with an umbrella. I am surprised, by Jenny's Letter,
to hear of good weather in Annandale; and fear it cannot last. The wet South pours out continual showers on us. I am getting
cloth blinds for my three windows here to shut out altogether the landscape, or rather brickscape and rubbishscape of Chelsea and its doings. I am myself my own salvation or perdition.4

Does any of you know that Belfast Lady; Authoress of a rather notable little Book which has arrived here? She seems to be
a connexion or kinswoman of the tall French Marshal Macdonald; prints at Bristol, dates occasionally from Liverpool, and seems
to be a wayfaring character.5

Enough, dear Brother. I must out now, in spite of the rain,—and sum up the futile strenuosities of the morning as I but may.
Endeavour often, thou wilt at last succeed better!

4. TC had returned to face the problems of writing about Cromwell or his period. There were difficulties: the problem that, in
spite of wide reading, he had not mastered the field; uncertainty about the need to write history; and an inability to find
the right form and subject. Notes in the Forster MS: ff. 107r.— 108v. show that he was making himself write without knowing
what to write about. Under the heading “Oliver Cromwell (27 Septr, 1841; Monday 1½ p.m.)!—” he begins: “O Oliver, my hero, can I by no alchemy extricate thee from the dim cave, where buried under
Presbyterian, Royalist and other obsolete rubbish thou liest unintelligible, all defaced, unrecognisable! Thou art become
a most gaunt, spectral nondescript; little other than a ghastly chimera. Yet of a very truth thou wert no chimera. Alas, neither
was thy Time chimerical. A most rugged, real, hard-struggling Time; when the sun shone on heroic toil of men … fighting with
all weapons the battle of the brave.— (Awful trash!)” These notes are followed (f.108r. and v.) by a lengthy sketch, “Oliver
Cromwell as a Drama.” See K. J. Fielding, “Unpublished Manuscripts—II: Carlyle's Scenario for Cromwell,” The Carlyle Newsletter 2 (1980):6–13, where it is wrongly dated at the end of 1842. It would seem that these and other drafts of various kinds, were experiments to find the right form; see K. J. Fielding,
“Carlyle and Cromwell: the Writing of History and ‘Dryasdust,’” Lectures on Carlyle and his Era (Strouse Lectures, vol. 2), ed. Jerry D. James and Rita Bottoms (Santa Cruz, 1985) 45–67. An important study of this part of TC's life and work is D. J. Trela, “The Writing of Thomas Carlyle's ‘Oliver Cromwell's
Letters and Speeches’” (Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Edinburgh, 1984), to which grateful acknowledgment is made.

5. Neither author nor book is further identified though they are later referred to as the “Irish Miss Macdonald” and the “Essay
on Educators” (TC to JAC, 9 Oct.). Jacques Etienne Joseph Alexandre Macdonald (1765–1840), French soldier of Scottish descent; created Marshal of France and Duc de Tarentum by Napoleon, 1809.